News, views, food, books and other writings, with the assist of character dolls. My art blog, dealing with fine art, exhibits and works in progress, is http://beautifulmetaphor.blogspot.com.
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Saturday, August 12, 2017

Roast vegetables and Two Fat Ladies

Revisiting roast vegetables today, with sweet potatoes, Granny Smith apple rings, hot Italian sausage, tofu, onions and various spices. The onions were just halved then unfurled, not chopped, and the only precooked item is the sweet potato, nuked for about 15 minutes, they were big. Otherwise it won't cook enough in the time you need for the other items. 410F oven, half an hour with a tinfoil hat on, as you see here, waiting, then half an hour sans hat.

This easily makes six meals for me, and freezes up a treat in single serving portions.

Other meals are all about farm produce, great tomatoes, fruit, herbs from my yard, all very virtuous.

I've been revisiting Two Fat Ladies, too, and if you haven't seen them, all the episodes are on YouTube nowadays, easy to find. Each episode is a combo of great cooking, very knowledgeable sidenotes by Clarissa, who is a brain of the first water, youngest barrister in England in her day, and spontaneous songs and other such things from Jennifer, while they're busy in the kitchen.

They visit various touristy type places, so there's scenery, and there's the nice sense of being behind the scenes, in a convent, and in Lincoln's Inn, and cricket clubs, Aldershot military camp, and so on. Veddy English, and very comic, most of it intentional. And Clarissa says auregAHno for oregano, too cool. They both come from great wealth and colorful families with all sorts of posh estates and things and they spare us the rawer facts about them (!) and the feuds. But they do give us all sorts of wild stories which definitely have the ring of truth.

They got through four seasons before Jennifer got ill and died, sadly. Then Clarissa did seasons of other stuff, like visiting country areas for country pursuits, and I couldn't bear to watch the joy she took in hunting and killing animals and birds, and the total disdain and outright rudeness she reserved for anyone not in her elevated social circle. So the cooking evidently brought out the best in her, stick with that if you want to watch her.

Here and there they do something I fancy, like Tomato Tartlets which are a kind of salade nicoise (insert your own cedilla there) in pastry shells, and a pastry made from ground almonds and other things rather than flour, interesting. Some great baking, too. They are actually very versatile, and in real life did some high end catering for all sorts of events and people. Jennifer is always the one to point out how a recipe can be adapted for cocktail party use, she being a great fan.

Mostly they slosh incredible amounts of cream and butter about (you should see Clarissa buttering a slice of bread, cor, a week's ration there) and large amounts of alcohol. For culinary purposes, of course. And slabs of meat. So a lot of it is viewing not emulating for me anyway, except that they always get the best ingredients, freshest, etc, good to copy. But great fun, and I recommend them.